6/24/2025 - Marble Hornets and My Brief Vacation Back Home
I went home to my parents last weekend. Every time I think about how I don't live there anymore I almost cry, I really miss it a lot.
I got to see my 2 friends from high school, and we watched the 10 hour long YouTube found-footage horror series Marble Hornets in its entirety. It's the second time I've made my friends watch it. I have the best friends in the whole world, even if we aren't as close as we used to be. I might write more about Marble Hornets and why I love it so much at a later date. I've loved it for a long time. It makes me think of being 11 years old with still the slightest edge of naivety, suppressing my growing understanding of what's possible so I could believe there was a chance the story was real, and that I was in on some morbid secret. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with horror and the supernatural and the idea of testing the limits of the world. In Cohen's Monster Theory, Thesis VI states that the fear of the monster is really a kind of desire: "The linking of the monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint". I took a folklore class on Vampires, and I wish I remembered how exactly my professor expanded on this concept. But, the idea is that in the age of adolescence, exploring horror stories and testing the supernatural are symbolic ways to explore maturity and adulthood in a controlled environment; "Through the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and permanently liminal space". It is a sort of rite of passage as an adolescent to prove you can handle fear (think of Bloody Mary, if you brought yourself to do it you probably felt some sense that you were more mature than your friends who wouldn't). Basically, as a pre-teen, my desire to engage in horror media might have at least partially stemmed from a desire to encroach the boundaries of what I perceived to be maturity, and to prove something to myself by doing so. Of course, I was too scared to do anything too brave. I never trespassed or ghost-hunted, and I didn't like cemeteries for fear that I would accidentally disrespect the dead. But I read creepypastas, and watched ARG YouTube series, and discussed playing various supernatural "games" with my friends that promised to enter us into a different dimension, but was always much too scared to actually play them. Thinking about this stuff also makes me incredibly nostalgic for how the internet used to work before an algorithm dictated which content you saw. It was much easier to fall down rabbit holes and locate communities on the big sites when search engines actually worked as intended, and recommendations were actually relevant to the last thing you had watched.
I rewatched Marble Hornets in the summer of 2022, the summer before I moved to college, the last summer I spent living at home. I was working at the mall at the time and listening to Taking Back Sunday's Tell All Your Friends on the commute. I can't remember exactly why I rewatched Marble Hornets, but the rewatch was I guess kind of the first watch, as I remember as a kid not actually managing to finish the series and being incredibly confused by almost all of it (there's a lot the series leaves implied, and 11 year old me hadn't developed inference skills yet. Also, the timeline's a bit difficult to follow). I rewatched Marble Hornets in many parts, but soon after forced my friend Dylan and my friend Emma to view it in 1-2 sittings. I don't know if it's actually best to watch it for the first time in one sitting, but it feels that way, as there are lots of little pieces that come back much later in the story and are much easier to forget if a lot of time has passed between watches. I also first learned how to make edits because of Marble Hornets. When I was a kid, I never really engaged with fandom culture, I guess I just didn't know how to find a community yet. But the Marble Hornets community has not ever really died completely since the series ended in 2014; there are still small, cult pockets in various corners of the internet that turn over every few years with a new batch of adolescents, and they aren't difficult to find if you just start tagging your posts. After I rewatched it this past weekend with Dylan and Emma and my boyfriend, who was seeing it for the first time, I sent all of my old edits to my boyfriend, because I’m still proud of them. I associate Marble Hornets and the summer of 2022 with 2000s emo-pop music and the last time I truly felt comfortable exploring a playground in the evening. I associate it with the abandoned properties of rural Ohio, and eating mall pretzels and working part time and two lane roads and my parents not being lonely in their house while I live far away. I really miss it so much but I know I wasn't truly happy then, either.
Eventually, my Marble Hornets obsession was eclipsed by my interest in Canadian rock. Marble Hornets isn't the most sustainable interest fandom-wise, much of that having to do with the aforementioned frequent adolescent turn-over, but I won't get into it, it's fine. I think it's really awesome that new young fans are even still able to locate the series at the rate they do (Tim from Marble Hornets briefly shared the same sentiment on his Tumblr). I still revisit Marble Hornets sometimes, although it feels kind of incongruent now that I no longer live in the place I most heavily associate with the series. It feels kind of sad, like I am trying to relive something that wasn't that good to begin with. Not Marble Hornets, Marble Hornets is good, but, my life back then. I think eventually I will find my way back home, or at least find another place resembling it.
My trip home had other highlights, too. My boyfriend and I went to Cuyahoga Valley together and he got to officially meet my dog. We went to a real good flea market, and I further conquered my fear of driving by spending 4 hours on the highway. It was funny, I used to have driving anxiety driving at home, but now that I've been driving in a city instead for the past month that fear at home is nearly gone. I was so scared before the trip, I caught myself trying to modify my plans to be less grand and fun than they were originally conceived to be in attempts to curb the chas of the already incredibly unlikely car accident or driving mistake from happening. But I am so glad I didn't. It was a great sort of vacation that my anxiety didn't deserve to get in the way of.nce
6/17/2025 - MASSIVE UPDATE TO MY LAST POST MUCH SOONER THAN ANTICIPATED
In an insane act of coincidence, like 10 minutes after I finished writing the previous post I PULLED A WEEN EPIC. I PULLED ONE. It was Puffy Cloud #2 Epic. Now, I am really really really happy that I pulled this. After all of my hard work and dedication. Like I don't think I've ever worked for anything harder in my life. HOWEVER, it is a #2 and not a #1, and it's not a Ween song I love or anything, so I am debating whether or not I should keep going. I am not sure yet. I mean, I don't even remember what it's like to play Soundmap normally. I don’t even know if I can go back. So. I will keep you updated on what I decide to do…..
6/17/2025 - The Quest for a Ween #1 Epic
I play this game called Soundmap, it's basically like Pokemon Go but for songs. There's a real-world map and all over it are spawnpoints for different songs, all pulled from Spotify's database. The idea is that you walk around in real life to different spawnpoints and collect songs. Each spawnpoint has a designated genre and spawn-frequency designation. Common songs are most common to spawn, and after that there's uncommon and rare songs. Even rarer than rare songs are shiny songs that can spawn from shiny spawnpoints. Each spawnpoint can also spawn a song that is rarer than the spawnpoint's designation (A rare song can come from an uncommon spawnpoint) but it can't go the other way around (If the spawnpoint is designated rare, you'll never pull an uncommon or a common from that spawnpoint, but you could pull a shiny). There are also moments, which are video clips of artists that can be randomly pulled from any spawnpoint. Those are rare but not as rare as shinies. New moments are released each week and once their release week ends you can no longer pull that specific moment from the map. And there are lyrics, which I think are about as rare as shinies, and allow you to select a couple lines from a song's lyrics to display. Lastly, there are epic versions of songs. Epics are the most rare type of song in the game, and you are very lucky if you pull one from the map. Each epic pulled is unique. If you pull the #1 epic of a song, then it will state that it is #1. If another person pulls the same song, they get the #2 epic, and so on and so forth.
Now, you can also do artist quests for songs if you haven't pulled what you want from the map (which you most definitely won't). Questing is basically trading in other songs for the artist you actually want. This also helps a lot because not every artist map spawns. For example, if I want a song by the band Ween, I can complete a quest like, "Merge 9 Kpop songs starting with E", and after I complete that I will get a random Ween song that I don't already have. It is possible to pull shinies and even epics from quests, but epics especially are rare, and it is said that if an artist has over 5 million listeners then you won't get their epic from a quest. Completing quests is usually not that difficult because a huge component of the game is trading songs. If I need a kpop song starting with E and I don't have any, and I'm not near a kpop song spawnpoint (not to mention, each spawnpoint has a cooldown period), I can trade with someone who does have a kpop song starting with E if I have something they are asking for. Usually people ask for coins, which can be collected in various ways (quickselling songs, selling valuable songs to other players, daily reward, minigames). Also, you can reroll a quest if it's too hard. You get 5 free rerolls a day, and then you can watch an ad for another one 5 more times until you get no more rerolls for that day. This helps a lot if the quest is something like "merge 7 rare songs" and you don't want to waste your more valuable songs on that.
I also must mention that there are specific shiny quests that you can do. Shiny quests are much harder than regular quests because they require you to merge shiny songs, and shiny songs are rare to pull and go for a lot more money than regular songs when trading. You also only get to complete one shiny quest a week, so once you complete the quest you can't complete another for 7 days, and you also can't reroll them, so you are stuck with what you get until you complete it. Completing a shiny quest gives you a shiny song from whatever artist you select that you already have all the regular songs for, but rumor has it you can pull an epic from this, too. Lastly, you can also get shinies by spending gems. Gems are harder to get, but you can earn them from leveling up sometimes and from certain minigames. The number of gems you must spend to get a shiny depends on the artist. The more popular the artist, the more expensive it is. Ween songs are 30 gems, which is quite a lot. I do believe you can also get an epic from doing this, but it's also super rare, as is any strategy to get an epic.
Now, Ween have less than 5 million listeners, so I should hypothetically be able to pull a Ween epic from questing. I really want a Ween epic because they are one of my favorite bands and the market for their songs on Soundmap is extremely competitive. Ween epics and lyrics can sell for hundreds of thousands of coins, and there is a select number of players that love Ween and once they buy an epic, will never get rid of it. However, I have been questing for a Ween epic for a while now, pulling all of the regular songs at this point and quickselling the same couple of Ween songs over and over again (because once you quest and get all of the regular, non-shiny/lyrics/epic songs, it won't let you keep questing), hoping that the next quest I complete will give me an epic, and I still haven't gotten an epic!!! I do believe Ween are map spawning right now as there are people that occasionally pull Ween epics/lyrics and don't actually collect the band. But like I said, the market is so competitive that when a Ween epic does get listed for sale or auction, I get outbid. Plus, it's not as special if you yourself don't pull the epic. I have also been buying Ween shinies when I can afford to with gems, and completing the shiny quests, but that hasn't yielded an epic, either.
You can do epic checks for artists and see which songs have already been pulled. Lucky for me, my favorite Ween song, the Stallion Pt. 3, has not been pulled by anyone yet. I'm nervous though because like I said, they seem to be map spawning, and if a random person pulls that song and sells it I'll either miss the auction entirely or get outbid. So I am hoping I get it first. I will be satisfied with any #1 epic though, as long as it's not a random remastered version of a song or from La Cucaracha (the worst Ween album).
ALL THAT BEING SAID, I have decided to actually start keeping track of the number of quests I complete to see just how long it takes me to get a Ween epic. Like I said, I've already been questing for a while, and I don't remember my specific start day. I believe it was sometime in late April or early May, though. From regular artist quests I have managed to pull I believe 5 Ween shinies, give or take. I can't remember which I got from shiny quests and gems vs regular pulls. But I think it's 5. I honestly have no idea how many quests I've been completing a day on average, but I am going to start keeping track starting tomorrow. I am not giving up, no matter how tedious it is (and it is tedious, because I am only allowing myself to complete Ween quests until I get this epic, so as not to waste my songs and coins trading for songs to complete other artist quests). I WILL pull a Ween #1 epic. I will.
6/17/2025 - On Ida
One of my favorite bands is called Ida. The story of why I first listened to them is kind of convoluted. There's a YouTube channel with some uploads of some old K Records cassettes, and when I was really into K records I listened to them and other cassettes the channel had uploaded, and one of these cassettes was by a band called My New Boyfriend whose singer, Jenny Toomey, had founded a record label called Simple Machines. I liked the My New Boyfriend cassette and eventually got around to checking out the Simple Machines label page on rateyourmusic.com, and the second highest rated album from the label was Ida's second record, I Know About You. I listened to it and loved it. It's a great album to recommend to people who don't normally listen to independent music because it's inabrasive and melodically strong, but the structures of the songs are still quite varied and unique. There's two vocalists, a boy and a girl. They're a couple. I read one time while surfing the old internet that the guy used to be a baker and the girl a kindergarten teacher. The old internet is a great place to surf when you're into 90s music. Although, I couldn't find much about Ida. No fansites or anything. I think that I am not naturally talented at exploring the old internet, but my passion for it enables me to persevere and make the surface-level discoveries.
One of my favorite memories is driving down to Ashland, Ohio over winter break to meet my boyfriend at the halfway point between our two houses. I was too scared to take I71, so I drove down the rural highways with my I Know About You CD playing in my car. I remember being so nervous to drive so far, but singing along to the harmonies relaxed me, and when I realized there were barely any other cars on the road I calmed down and committed the pastoral scenes of Amish country to memory. I remember my boyfriend and I grabbing our own cups at the bad pizza place in Ashland, and the record store with every Lisa Germano CD but the one I wanted, with the mean cashier who kindly let my boyfriend have the autobiographical spoken-word Holocaust survivor record for free. I remember driving over to Mansfield and being in awe at the huge abandoned factories, almost crashing into a lady while trying to get a better look and daydreaming about living in a place that is half the small town I used to know and half the city to provide me with some semblance of growth from my old life. I remember getting glazed donuts together at Dunkin' Donuts, and the cute vintage half-denim half-flower dress at the oddly-shaped Goodwill that was too stained to buy. I remember the chocolate-coated potato chips at Grandpa's Cheesebarn and picking out flowers at the Walmart, whose parking lot housed my car as my boyfriend drove me around for the duration of our explorations.
I remember, as a last-ditch effort to make connections before graduating, talking music with the coolest professor I ever had (He was in this band), and him telling me to listen to Ida, one of his favorite emo bands. I am still embarrassed by how loud I gasped after he mentioned them. His favorite song is Post-prom Disorder (this version). I'm not sure which Ida song is my favorite. I like Post-prom Disorder because it reminds me of a friendship breakup, and sometimes reigniting feelings of sadness is more comforting than the nothingness of present. I like Thank You, the song I had on repeat a few weeks before I had officially ended aforementioned friendship, crying myself to sleep after being cancelled on for what felt like the millionth time but was probably only the seventh or eighth. I like Back Burner, which reminds me of community college, a time of which I can only remember the thirty-minute commute to and from my two classes where I aimed to learn absolutely nothing. I like Coupons, a song my boyfriend and I say we are going to learn how to play but which I don't usually remind him of because I do not want to be anxious about my singing voice the way I was the few years ago when I was truly passionate about it, being outgoing for the last time of my life in high school drama class and recording original songs on my dad's guitar looper, whose lyrics I still mourn losing with the death of my old android. And I like Treasure Chest, a song that does not mean anything in particular to me, but has an incredible use of dynamics and the best lyrics of any Ida song.
Ida is one of my favorite bands, but I have only heard their first 3 albums. I listen to music very much in phases. I do not move onto another record by a band until I have absolutely worn out the ones I am already familiar with, and their first two are incredibly difficult to wear out. I did move onto the third record and it wasn't really as good. It's lacking the vocal harmonies of the first two. That kind of disappointed me and I guess dissuaded me from working the rest of the way through their discography, but I'll probably return eventually. Ida is a staple slower band for me. Most of the music I listen to isn't really like that, and I find most music with the "slowcore" label quite unmemorable. Ida, however, is different. And having a slow band to listen to for when the weather turns or for when things get sad is one of life's essential crutches.
6/13/2025 - Brian Wilson and More on Nonfiction Writing
I found out that I have a free New York Times subscription through my work while I was trying to access the university library. Brian Wilson died recently, so a lot of the articles in the music section were about him.
I think that I would really enjoy being a nonfiction writer. Unlike fiction writing, there are built-in parameters. There is truly a finite amount of information to discuss about Brian Wilson. And instead of trying to engineer meaning by painfully hypothesizing the endless possibilities for coincidence and symbolism in something you're making up, nonfiction writing is deciding how to best present the symbolism that inherently exists in everything that's real. It is having the know-how to decide which facts are relevant enough to the story you are trying to extrapolate from reality. Basically, nonfiction writing is making something out of something more than fiction writing is making something out of something. Fiction writing is a lot more making something out of nothing, although I guess something can't come from nothing.
One could think, however, that the built-in parameters of nonfiction writing make it harder to have something interesting to say. I mean, there have probably been thousands of articles written about Brian Wilson, and Brian Wilson is just one guy. The Pet Sounds album has 927 reviews on Rateyourmusic.com, and that album's only 13 songs. There are only so many novel ways to approach a thing that's as set in stone as reality. Having an interesting perspective is part of it, though. And personally, I notice my favorite reviewers not by the novel things they have to say, but by the rotating door of adjectives they use to describe music (haunting, lush, blasting, resonant), and the balancing act it takes to disperse each one satisfyingly throughout a piece of writing. Nonfiction writing is a lot of adjective fact adjective fact. It is a lot about the rhythms of sentences. So is fiction writing, but I think in nonfiction writing it is more essential. You have limited parameters, so the things that you can control have higher stakes.
Anyways, it's interesting to see how pervasive a force can be in your life without you realizing it. When I was a kid, the Beach Boys to me were just that one band that appeared on Full House. I used to not understand why all of my favorite indie musicians would cite the same 3 hugely popular bands as their main inspirations, bands I thought they sounded nothing like. But I realize now that those bands' influence is inevitable. How can you make power pop music without citing the Beach Boys? Everything builds off of the last thing. We are all Eve's children.
I love power pop music, so I love Brian Wilson, even if I only gave Pet Sounds 3.5 stars. I want to read more about the exact role he played in the Beach Boys, just how much he in particular acted as the creative force in the band. I also enjoyed the article I read about their Pendleton blazers. Short but sweet. The relationship between music and fashion has always interested and inspired me. I want to write about it more, eventually.
6/10/2025 - What is Summer Knowledge but More Meta
I have this ideal version in my head of what this online journal will look like, and it includes long, insightful nonfiction posts coming out on the regular, posts that I do not have confidence I'll be able to produce as frequently as I would like, if ever. Instead, I want to give myself the emotional freedom to write just about anything here. Half-baked ideas, itemized lists, note to selfs. I will not have something important to say every single day. The pressure to always say something important, or to know how to convey the important thing that I am thinking, is what stalls my writing. Its what makes me go on lengthy, months-long breaks from creativity. Not only breaks from my creative output, but my intake as well, as I sit and wait for an inspiration that will not come uncoaxed, procrastinating reading and listening to other people's stories because I don't want to be reminded of my own inability to make something. But creative intake is what inspires me the most.
So, I will continue reading Dandelion Wine, the book my boyfriend and I decided to read together this summer, and see if a story of my own will come from that. I've already written a paragraph or two about it actually, I just think I need to read more of the book before my ideas fully form. And I will continue to listen to new albums, and maybe write about my music listening patterns, and watch old interviews of my favorite bands, and finish watching Daria for the second or third time, and dedicate myself to consuming art so that I might have enough feelings stirred in me to share something of my own. It is nice that it is not only the writing of this site that can motivate me, but the design itself, a more implicit creative expression that might be easier to delve into when the words do not come out as nice as I would like. I also think I'll explore other people's Neocities sites tonight to find some inspiration.
I do not have a schedule for when exactly I will release new journal entries yet, and I think I am going to keep it that way for the foreseeable future, as making a commitment like that will only make me feel pressure and, inevitably, dread. For now, just keep checking back in occasionally if you want, and I might add to the interests page soon to give you enough context to want to stick around.
6/6/2025 - What is Summer Knowledge?
I am sitting at work with nothing to do, trying to gain a surface level understanding of the poem which has served as my online namesake for the past 5 or so years. It is my identity in the most logical sense of the word, the code through which I am perceived in the spaces where my life is spent the most. Summer Knowledge, a username that has served me well, because even though I use the same name on all online platforms, almost none of them are found through a simple google search due to Delmore Schwartz' 1959 poetry collection cluttering the results. It's a beginner's guide level of anonymity that prevents the most casual of cyber stalkers from keeping well-rounded tabs on my online presence. Not that that matters. Or that I think I have cyber stalkers. All I know is that sometimes I try to cyberstalk myself, and it's not as easy as it should or could be, because of Delmore Schwartz.
Delmore Schwartz, a 20th century existentialist writer guy, an inspiration to Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, a man I found out about through an online high school vocabulary program called Membean, that used a quote of his to help define the term "paranoid" (a quote that I later found out was actually misattributed to him, funny enough). I googled his name and read some of his work, my favorites being his short stories, like The World is a Wedding, a parody of Great Depression-era bohemians and the feelings of entitlement that enable them to sit around and write poetry while New York is under financial collapse, or The Statues, a surreal piece that highlights the fragility of our emotional wellbeing when hinged wholly on distractions from the facts of our lives that make them feel not worth living. Basically pretentious stuff, but I liked his writing style, the way he'd take three sentences to describe something that should've taken one, because he found satisfaction in the rhythms of words. Delmore Schwartz died destitute in a NYC hotel room, alone, in the mid 1960s. Summer Knowledge was the last poetry collection published before his death. I never read it, opting instead for a best-of collection my parents had gotten me for Christmas. But I knew the title, and as an ardent lover of summer and its heat, and its existence as a period of freedom from school, and the expectations school placed to be constantly moving forward and away from the girlhood I closely identify with, I knew it would be a fitting username.
Until now, and even, I would say, now, I have only ever really skimmed the title poem in this collection. It is long, much longer than the poems from his best-of collection, and today, 5 years removed from the Delmore Schwartz obsession, it is even harder to unpack as my 3 years as a college English major have indoctrinated me into believing the benefits of concision, and 'Summer Knowledge' might be as wordy as it gets. But, as I try to prevent my eyes from glazing past words and sentences my mind subconsciously deems inessential, I find bits and pieces that stick out to me. "Summer knowledge is green knowledge, country knowing, the knowledge of growing and The root's recognition of the fullness and the fatness and the roundness of ripeness". Yes, summer is a time of growing, a time when I have historically been blessed with the resources (time specifically, the most precious resource of them all) to dedicate myself to my interests (album listening and internet fandom engagement) in spite of how useless they are in developing the skills that society deems worthy. A time when I have gotten to grow into myself and learn what I am truly passionate about. Of course, as a recent college grad settling into her first "career" job, summer is no longer a constant period of freetime. Really, summer hasn't truly been that since I was 16 years old, when I got my first part time job as a crew member at Mcdonald's. Still, something about the longer days of summer, and the weather that permits leaving the house at almost any time of day, helps the season retain its sense of infinity, and helps me to retain the motivation to use summer's infinite day as an opportunity to self-develop.
Now, there are other lines that I don't feel like expending the mental energy to try to unpack. "The knowledge of the fruit is not the knowledge possessed by the root in its indomitable darkness of ambition, sucking the rain". I think my old English professor, the one that I used to not like because she criticized my use of nominalizations, until I realized she was right, might have something to say about the heavy use of nominalizations in this quote, and how it makes it difficult to understand. Maybe reading Delmore in high school CAUSED my heavy use of nominalizations. But anyways, that is something that I want to get better about. Challenging myself. Challenging myself to interpret a line of poetry that is not easily understood, or challenging myself to finish a TV show, even if it is not necessarily the thing that interests me the most at that exact point in time anymore. If summer is a time to self-develop, then it also has to be a time to challenge oneself. And there are other lines that seem to say much more than that last line in less words. "Summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as birth and rebirth, of death as the soil of all abounding, flowering and growing to the fruit's fulfillment". I was going to analyze this line, but I thought that some things are maybe better left unsaid. Maybe the hypothetical readers of this site can unpack this one on their own and see what it means to them. I have my own interpretation.
Anyways, that is what Summer Knowledge is. That is what it means to me. A poem that I have only half-read in the 5 years that I have known of its existence. That hasn't kept me from identifying with it in my own unique way. And besides, outside the poem, both words have their own clear, inarguable meanings. Summer and Knowledge. Summer knowledge. I am summer knowledge. I possess knowledge of summer, and summer is what I have knowledge about. Yes, my favorite season, summer, which I prefer to be knowledgeable of. There it is. I am summer knowledge.
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